


Que Sera, Sera

by Pashalawa



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M, Secret Relationships, What am I doing, alpha's sergeant and rto duo, knock-off bradray, war snippets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 00:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30097155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pashalawa/pseuds/Pashalawa
Summary: Legend has it that over in Alpha, there exists a knockoff-Bradray. Although, if you ask John, Brad and Ray are the knock-offs. Alpha means first, baby.Take a journey through some moments in Alpha's GenKill Journey with John and Damon.Have you ever written something and then immediately asked yourself why?
Relationships: Brad Colbert/Ray Person, John Burris/Damon Fawcett, John Burris/Pound Cake, Marines/Jalapeno and Cheese
Comments: 5
Kudos: 7





	Que Sera, Sera

**Author's Note:**

> Look, sometimes when you're on your 30th watch of Generation Kill you notice some strange shit—like how John seems to call his Sergeant pussy more than he should and that they share some pretty sad stares over messy orders. Thus, the comparison was made. 
> 
> Based on fictional character interpretations as portrayed in the HBO series 'Generation Kill'. Not meant to be reflective at all of the actual boys out there livin' their lives and doin' their best. Hats off. 
> 
> Spoiler Alert: IDK what I'm doing, it should become rapidly apparent.
> 
> Rated T for general Generation Kill language, which is, as you all know...a lot. Also rated T for depictions of war, and the realities of it.

If there was ever a moment Damon regretted doing his job, it was now. 

Walking around in these giant, scorched holes felt a little surreal, like he was walking through a comic book scene, a molecule coasting through the pop art. It didn’t feel like real land anymore. Even the smells seemed artificial as he slipped down the side of a blackened pockmark. 

“Jesus Christ dude.” Smith was kicking around near the edge where it looked like a poor lone tree had been the only victim of the airstrike. Damon wondered, for a brief, strange moment, about how sad that was. Then he thought about how sad it was that he found the dead tree sad when they’d passed dozens of dead bodies in the past few days. What the hell happened to him out here that made him more sympathetic to a tree? Christ almighty was that one to keep to himself. “That’s one hell of an airstrike you had the LT call in.” 

Damon didn’t answer, but John seemed more ruffled by it. He could hear it in the edge of his voice, insulted that Smith would insinuate that he had even an ounce of control over what happened out here. He knew by now what certain tones meant—it took a lot of study, because John almost always had a _tone_ of some sort. “It’s not on me,” John said, tired and irritated as he stalked around the hole. He was only half-heartedly searching, more for show than anything else at this point. Damon didn’t blame him. He knew the second they’d rolled up in the Humvee that they hit nothing but space. 

“11,000 pounds of bombs,” Smith continued, and Damon pressed his headset closer to his ear so he could hear the LT better. Even over Smith’s goading and the less-than-optimal connection, the man sounded stressed. “That’s some _serious_ shock and awe.” 

Damon knew why the LT was pressuring them. Wasting that much hellfire wasn’t a good look by any stretch of the imagination. The money that went into this was sure to be a number that Damon would never have a fraction of in his lifetime. How much did that airstrike cost? Millions? “Still awaiting your B.D.A, do you copy?” 

The radio crackled and hissed as Damon pressed his thumb on the comm. “Assassin Two, yeah, we copy.” He released and chewed at the side of his lip, looking out of the expansive nothingness in front of them. Such a fuckin’ waste. “The LT’s really freakin’. Needs us to find something we hit,” Damon called back to his team, with no expectation that his men would actually unearth anything in this mess. 

He didn’t even have to look at Smith to know he was grinning. “How many tanks is that, John. 140?”

He did look at John, though. John looked as tired as he sounded, like he was one snappy comment away from entering the barren no-man’s-land of a _real_ bad mood. Damon might have put some energy into roadblocking that if he hadn’t been so sour himself. Besides, it wasn’t on John, and Smith knew it. If anything, it would be on Damon, and then the LT. But Smith wouldn’t _mock_ his Sergeant, so John was the easiest target. John seemed to know that, if the dry look he tossed toward Damon was anything to go by as he clambered down the light charred slope himself. “I told you motherfucker,” he snipped, not even bothering to look up while he adjusted a strap on his vest. “It was the LT that called it.” 

“Check it out y’all.” Smith kept going, because he didn’t care if John was in a bad mood. It wasn’t like _he’d_ have to deal with it. Again, Damon felt the urge to self-preserve a bit, aware that staving this off now would be beneficial in the long run. But he couldn’t bring himself to intervene. He was too annoyed at the fact that they’d wasted a mind boggling amount of ordinance on a misunderstanding. He barely flicked his eyes over to Smith as he held up some sort of broken antenna. “It’s all that’s left of a tank. You’ll get the Navy Comm for this one. We could have been overrun.”

“Fuck you.” John snapped, and Damon then understood what it was like to have instant regret at a choice you’d just made. Firmly in a bad mood now, John stomped up to Damon with his eyes squinted at the harsh and unimpeded sunlight. “Damon, don’t be a pussy. Fuckin’ call it in. Give the LT a tank. He can get his medal, we can get the fuck outta here.”

A pussy, huh? The nerve John sometimes had. Did anyone _else_ just get to call their Sergeant a pussy for no good reason? No. No, they did not, and Damon was pretty much positive that if it wasn’t just them out here, wandering around in this dumb meteorite site, John wouldn’t have done it. Regardless, it rubbed him the wrong way. Pussy? Bitching out and _lying_ about it was being a pussy. Damon pressed his thumb to the switch with a renewed attitude. When he spoke, his tone was bordering on sassy, which was generally something he liked to avoid when speaking to his LT. “Assassin Two, this is Two-Three, Over.” He waited patiently for the _send it_ prompt. “Yeah, we’ve covered three grid squares. We have nothing. I say again, nothing. How copy?”

He heard John huff behind him as he listened to the follow up. Then he felt a bit sorry—he knew why John wanted to get it over with. It was _pretty_ fucking embarrassing, and even though the responsibility was with the LT, they still passed that information along. It was Damon’s fault for not being able to properly identify what a damn _town_ was. It wasn’t fair that it was John getting teased for it.

Then again, John called him a pussy, so John could deal with it. “There should be a trail up there, they’re extracting us.” Damon started heading out of the divot, bracing himself with one hand at the top for a graceful exit as John trailed behind him, taking a few extra steps because his boots kept dislodging dirt on the way up. Behind them, Smith stayed in the hole, surveying like an explorer cresting the hills of an undiscovered valley. 

“If there’d been tanks here,” he started, as Damon and John waited by the trail. “That would’ve been fucking cool.” 

* * *

Later that night, back at the airfield, Damon busied himself by cleaning his weapon. They were still on half watch, despite the fact that the airfield had been abandoned far before they’d arrived—a sore spot for their recon resume, that’s for sure. He still thought the time table was too clipped. They could have gotten eyes on the space easily if they’d been given more time but he wasn’t a goddamn magician, he simply couldn’t rectify the time allotted with the distance they needed to travel. _Then_ they’d followed it up with that embarrassing airstrike...yes, troubling times for Alpha. 

That’s what he was thinking about before John popped out of the driver’s seat to join him by the front of the humvee. He was slurping something out of an MRE packet. One of the burger patties, from the look of it. “Hey,” he said, not even bothering to offer some of that soupy mistake to Damon. He knew better. At least Damon hoped he did. “So that was a fat waste of time.” 

Sure fucking was, but it was too early in the game to start getting in his head about this stuff. Damon worked best when he kept his thoughts in nice little boxes. Thick, locked, padded boxes that were at minimum six feet away from each other. He rested his cleaned gun safely against his leg and shrugged his shoulders. “Que Sera, Sera,” he said, and John didn’t react. It was something Damon said often. He picked it up from his mother, and while Damon didn’t quite like to think that he picked up habits from his mother, he’d been quoting that song for the entire war thus far. “It’s not on our heads,” he continued. “We were just passing along information. It’s on the LT. He didn’t see the need to recon it, or verify the information, and he also didn’t see the need to contact the Captain about it.”

That got a snort from John. Yeah, that was a big one. Damon was surprised in the moment. It was pretty rare for anyone to go over their captain’s head, especially when Patterson was one of the more competent officers in the battalion. A daring choice, all in the name of glory. “Bet he’s fuckin’ sweating.” John chuckled and kicked his heel to the tire. It made a dull thudding sound, and Damon glanced to the back side of them quickly to make sure the other two were still asleep in their graves. “You don’t think he’ll throw us under the bus?”

“Nope.” That, he was sure of. It might make sense in theory but admitting that you not only fucked up an airstrike but _also_ didn’t do the job of being in _command_ would just make a bigger mess for the guy. “Just makes him look worse. We’re not in charge. He is.” He sounded more confident than he felt, though. He stared out over the edge of the airfield. Their humvee was as close to the others as they all were, but the angle made it feel a little cut off. Out in the distance he could see the lights of a few civilian homes. Imagine living there, so close to an invading (or liberating force, depending on who you favored), and having to go about your business like nothing was amiss. You’d have to make dinner and tend to your goats and pretend that getting lit up by trigger-happy and inexperienced soldiers wasn’t even a possibility. “Officers never know how to call in a fuckin’ air strike anyway. No one will care.” 

It came off a little more dejected than he meant it to, but John didn’t seem to care. He only mumbled his agreement and crumpled the now empty packet in his fist. “We fuck up like that, and our heads roll.” 

Damon glanced over to him, trying to detect any possible worry in the lines of his face. It was unlike John to fuss about this kind of thing. Usually a colossal fuck up of this magnitude made him laugh at the insanity of it all, like he was merely a spectator in some live-action story. But Smith got him riled up about it, so maybe he _was_ feeling some type of way about the whole mess. But he didn’t seem upset when he turned to look back at Damon. His light smile was more matter-of-fact than anything else. Damon felt himself smiling too, despite himself. “My head will roll first, so rest easy,” he joked, though he certainly meant it. He was the Sergeant here. It would be on him before it would be on John, and he’d make sure of that.

His rather heroic (though expected) self-sacrifice made John laugh. It was a little louder than it should have been, but fuck it. Damon had adopted the fuck it policy as far as anything regarding John a long time ago and thus far, it had yet to bite him in the ass. “I like your head,” John said, and even reached out to cup his hand over the curve of Damon’s helmet to playfully shove his face to the side. “It would be a waste of a nice head.” 

Damon steadfastly ignored the light blush he felt racing up the pale skin of his neck, like he’d had an allergic reaction to something. He let his head be pushed to the side and lolled it back dramatically, enough to pull another laugh from John. He seemed to be in a better mood already. He usually was. “I’d rather keep it,” Damon admitted. Sacrificing or not, he had plans in life that depended on his head staying attached to his body. 

For a second they rested in a comfortable silence. Relative silence, of course. Even if most of their camp was settled down and quiet, he’d occasionally hear a bark of laughter drifting up from somewhere. They were far enough ahead of the invasion that for a while, even the night had been quiet. But now everyone was caught up—he could hear distant gunfire and thunderous calls of jets somewhere above them. He preferred it that way. How eerie would it be, to be here with no sound, nothing but your own thoughts? He preferred the sound of the war to the sound of peace. The thought made him cringe. 

Luckily, John was always around to disrupt his Alice-like falls down his various rabbit holes. The Humvee creaked slightly as John lifted himself up on the hood, hands dangling between his thighs as his arms rested on his knees. “What do you think about Colbert and Person?”

The question was surprising to Damon, though maybe it shouldn’t have been. He wasn’t best pals with Brad Colbert. They didn’t really go out for beers and talk about their lives and hopes and dreams, but he’d known him long enough that he liked to think he knew more than the average joe. At least in Colbert terms. Ray Person was a different entity, one that Damon thought might have originally been from outer space. He didn’t _say_ anything, but John must have clocked the look on his face. He smugly squared his shoulders and looked out over the field. “I thought so.” 

Damon frowned. “I didn’t say anything.” And he _hadn’t_! He wouldn’t. Listen, he might have had his theories about Brad and Ray (though he also had some theories about Fick and Brad, which threw his whole theory orbit out of whack), but he’d never speculate out loud about it. It was none of his business, and he knew how dangerous it could potentially be for them to start talking about it. All it would take is the wrong person catching the wrong few words and there could be a whole investigation. As someone trying to actively avoid an investigation into a similar matter, Damon found himself honor-bound to protect his fellow marines against speculation, true or otherwise. 

John apparently felt no such camaraderie. Instead, he rolled his eyes at Damon’s tone. “Yeah, cause you’re a pussy,” he said, with a teasing bite to his tone that made Damon squint at him. _Too soon,_ he wanted to say, but the threat would have been undercut by his smile. “They’re fuckin.” 

Jesus. Damon looked over his shoulder to make sure they were alone. He sent a small, sideways glare toward John, offended that he’d toss that out there so freely. It wasn’t like they were _entirely_ alone, out here. They were definitely within earshot of some marines who may or may not have been sleeping, voices tempered or otherwise. “We don’t know that.” Damon continued to treat John to a very pointed look, until John eventually capitulated and held up his hands in a surrender. “We don’t know anything.” 

Unfortunately for Damon, John never really surrendered so much as he played dead, like a sneaky opossum by the side of the road. He merely shrugged, unbothered, and looked up at the sky above him. It was remarkably starry out here, which was a fact that Damon kept to himself. If you don’t know, you don’t know, right? “I know what I see and what I see, I know,” John countered. 

He was right. Maybe it took one to know one. Maybe they were in a unique position to scope that shit from a distance. Or maybe it was just what Damon _wanted_ to believe. It was nice to think they weren’t the only ones out here flying in the face of rules and regulations. Sometimes he felt bad about it. He was, after all, a rule follower. Damon respected _why_ said laws existed. It’s just that sometimes someone came by and suddenly your priorities shifted. It would be a great comfort to know that Brad had _also_ decided to shift his priorities. 

He wanted to ask if John felt the same, but it wasn’t a conversation they could have here. Instead, he filed it away in the bin that he saved for when they touched back down on home ground. He had a whole package of conversations he’d saved up, day by day. Little comments he hadn’t been able to make, observations that had to go ignored. At least, with this topic, he was fairly sure he knew the answer. John hadn’t brought it up for a bout of mean-spirited gossip. “They’re a fuckin’ weird pair,” his driver said, almost contemplatively. 

Damon rolled his eyes and reached into his pocket. He saved this particular meal for a rainy day, and two fuck-ups in a row? That had to count, right? The coveted jalapeno and cheese was now the most priceless item to barter with. He could have saved it and used it to trade from some lube or maybe, if he was lucky, enough batteries to power his entire humvee. But right now? Right now, he just wanted to eat his jalapeno and cheese. 

He could feel John’s eyes zoning in on his rarity. He fully intended to share, but there was no fun in it if he didn’t make him sweat it out just a _little_. “No more weird than us,” Damon said, nipping at the packaging with his teeth. “I mean, really, no more weird than any of us.” 

This seemed to be an egregious offense to John. The look Damon got in return was more like the look of someone staring in horror during a live execution. “That’s fucked up,” John noted, and Damon laughed lightly under his breath. For a minute, they were quiet as Damon wrestled with the pack. Eventually, John snatched it from his hands and opened it. He handed it back without taking some first, which was quite the rare show of trust. “Colbert is an intense guy,” John eventually finished. 

Damon nodded slowly, as if he’d just heard some very sage advice from an old man running the gas station in the beginning of a horror movie. He took a bite of his MRE and then licked his lips. “You think someone called the Iceman is an intense guy?” He let out a low whistle and John sucked his teeth at him in a sharp sound. “Hot take, John.” 

After a long draw from his canteen, John flipped him off. “Your sarcasm is noted and fuckin’ rejected,” he said, and then tilted his head to the side. It was a very pinched expression, like he couldn’t quite figure out what he was trying to say. “He is, he’s a weird guy. Thinks he’s the hottest shit. You can tell.” 

Ah. Less weird and more intimidating, was Damon’s guess. That wasn’t a hot take at all. Brad intimidated most people. Damon figured it was half the height and half the fact that he walked around like a senior quarterback wading through lost freshman. “Maybe he is,” Damon said, just to see the flat look John would treat him too. He didn’t have to wait long at all. Damon laughed and leaned back on the humvee, stretching his legs out in front of him. “He has the rep to back it up. Besides, I like him.” 

There was some commotion in the field. Damon tuned in enough to know that it sounded like Bravo was getting ready to roll out. His eyes flicked over to where the other team was stationed, just across the way. He wouldn’t start packing it in yet, not until he was sure the orders applied to them too. “You like everyone,” John said, clearly thinking the same and focusing back on the conversation at hand. His heels banged noisily against the front end of the humvee and Damon automatically reached a hand out to still them. After a beat, John injected a salty-sounding follow-up. “I have a rep.” 

Pft. Damon tried not to laugh, but it didn’t do much good hiding it because John immediately smacked his shoulder. “No...you don’t.” 

John rolled his eyes and smacked Damon’s arm again for good measure, as if he expected Damon to just blatantly lie to his face about some mythical reputation he had. “Shut the fuck up and give me your jalapeno and cheese.” John held out his hand, palm up, fingers wiggling expectantly. But Damon did not oblige just yet. He was too busy still laughing about the fact that John had said, in all seriousness, that he had a _rep_ . Like people over in Bravo were over there whispering over their watch hours. _Yo, you hear about John? Legendary._ John didn’t seem to care. He was a man of singular focus now. “Come on, didn’t your mother teach you the values of sharing?”

Damn. His mother _did_ teach him the importance of sharing. That and the fact that he was planning on sharing in the first place. But he would go ahead and make a big show of _just_ how gracious he was, allowing John to partake in this near religious experience. He shook his head as he handed the packet over. “I am _such_ a good person.” 

John was too busy enjoying the jalapeno and cheese to acknowledge Damon’s verified Sainthood. “Sure, bud,” he said, but his heart wasn’t into it. His heart was very busy eating _way_ more than half of the packet. Trying Damon’s saintly reserve so soon, was he? 

It didn’t matter. Damon got enough of it. And John graciously saved the last bits to squeeze out for him. Across the way, Bravo was kicking into high gear. Soldiers were kicking at their brothers laying down in the graves and rolling up the camo nets. He wondered briefly what was going on, but it wasn’t worth it. Knowing, unfortunately, wasn’t their job. He didn’t let that get to him anymore—couldn’t afford to. “Look, don’t go spreading that shit around about Colbert and Person,” Damon said suddenly. It wasn’t so much that he thought John would. The man could be thoughtful when he felt like it. But marines talk, and some things needed to stay out of the mouth. “It’s no one’s business.”

The look he got almost made him spit up the sip of water he’d started taking. He’d never seen John look so... _matronly_. Like a disapproving grandmother, all pursed lips and pinched brows. “You really think I’d expose a fellow dick licker?” Tch, come on. Damon sighed out his nose and John snorted, bumping his shoulder with his own. “It’s like you don’t know me at all.”

Fair enough. He shouldn’t have even mentioned it. John wasn’t _like_ that. He still felt the urge, like he had this big secret to keep right next to his own big secret and now both secrets couldn’t be kept and _one_ had to come out, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be his. 

That was just a feeling. He was more than capable of holding multiple secrets. He still hadn’t told anyone that Steven, his best friend in highschool, shit his pants in the tenth grade and had Damon go to his gym locker to get him the shorts. So all in all, he was a pretty damn good secret keeper because that was a _hilarious_ secret.

“Besides, I don’t care. Good for them.” John kept talking, nodding to himself as though their relationship (or lack thereof, because Damon knew _nothing_ ) needed his approval. Then he held up one finger, tacking on a proverbial asterisk to his claim. “However, they _are_ copying us.” 

Well, Damon was pretty sure _that_ wasn’t true. Look, he didn’t know jack shit, but he _did_ know that Ray and Brad seemed pretty damn buddy buddy back in Afghanistan. Sure, not to this level, but if Damon had to put money on it (which he wouldn’t because he was not a betting man), he’d put it on the fact that he and John were the copiers in this particular situation. “I’m pretty sure they predate us.”

“What?” John made a face—a deep frown as his chin tucked to his chest. To console him, Damon offered him a drink from his own canteen. He noticed John guzzling his whole can down earlier like a dehydrated bear. “Bullshit. You’re trying to tell me _we’re_ the knock-offs?” John shook his head, but then took the canteen anyway and tipped it up to his lips. His thin eyebrow quirked quizzically at Damon. “How do you know?” 

Short answer, he didn’t. The long answer was that he was a damn recon marine and sometimes when you’re trained to observe, you _notice_ things. Although it was extremely probably that he was just projecting. It was easy to project out here. Hell, after a while, everyone started to look the same. Didn’t matter what race or background you came from, everyone started to have the same _look_ about them. Projecting was Damon’s bread and butter. But he wasn’t about to share _that_ tonight. “You can just tell.” 

“Tch.” John rolled his eyes and finally slid off the hood of the humvee. His boots thunked to the ground just as some of their platoon a few humvees down started to stir. Looks like they were getting whatever order Bravo got. Damon was in no hurry, so he stayed against the hood and watched it move down the line, from humvee to humvee. John’s voice brought him back to focus. “You think you’re some old blind precognizant witch don’t you.” 

Damon snorted. “Yes. Clearly, that’s what I think I am.” He pressed a finger to his temple, slipping just under the rim of his helmet. “In fact, I’m getting a message from the beyond right now...we’re about to get a visit from the LT.” 

John hadn’t been looking behind them—truly not the proper recon behavior for a man of his _reputation._ For a split second, he almost looked confused before he turned around just in time for the LT to stroll up to them, looking tense and disapproving. 

“We’re Oscar Mike in ten,” he barked, and Damon dipped his head in acceptance of the order with a quick _Yes Sir._ John fell into step behind him as he gathered his trash from the MRE and tossed it on the floor of the humvee. He’d put it in the makeshift trash bag later—it felt better than leaving it on the side of the road. If a force ever came to play on American soil, he would hope they would do the same. 

“Shit,” John muttered. He stood next to him and fiddled with his gun position. “Told you, shoulda called in the tank. Now he’s all pissy with us.” 

In Damon’s opinion, the LT was just pissy in general. But there wasn’t time to dawdle on that now. They could talk about it later. “Que sera sera, Johnny,” Damon mumbled affectionately. Then he clapped his hands loudly together as he walked toward the back of the humvee where the rest of his team had dug their graves. “Come on boys! Rise and shine, we got shit to do today.” 

* * *

Damon’s lips were _incredibly_ chapped. 

Seriously, the level of chapping was borderline torture. The higher-ups had thought to supply them with all kinds of other medical problem-solvers, but not one person had thought that _maybe,_ just _maybe_ , they’d need some damn lip balm. What, was that too feminine for the Marine corps? Better have these crusty teeth shields, right? God. 

It was safe to say he was not in the perkiest of moods as he glared through his binoculars at the Iraqi soldiers casually waltzing around on the upper balconies of the buildings. “We got armor for this,” he muttered, half expecting no one to respond. 

John did. “Yeah, we’re gonna fuck some shit up,” he said, though he sounded less enthused by the idea and more like he was reading off a list of upcoming assignments out of a syllabus. Damon went back to staring at the Republican Guard units. What was going _on_ here? They were camped right across from this place—directly in front of the enemy...and nothing was happening? What a strange, uncomfortable stalemate. He almost wished he was back with Bravo doing absolutely ridiculous things like spearheading through a new hostile town. At least he understood what they were trying to do here. This was like some weird fraternity row situation with rival houses facing each other and taunting each other from the porches. 

Only here, one of the _frats_ had some massive firepower flying overhead. 

“Plain as day,” Damon muttered, shaking his head. “Republican guard walking around armed, and in uniform. Like it’s cool.” One of the men almost looked like he was looking right at him, like he could see Damon scoping him from his position, laid down among the dead bodies that collected with the trash on the roadside. It unnerved him enough to set down his binoculars for a second.

John stepped out from where they were positioned and started to walk across the road, casually, like this was some random cul-de-sac that he’d grown up in playing street hockey or whatever it was he did growing up. Damon made a face, but otherwise didn’t comment. It wasn’t particularly dangerous, and John tended to do what John was going to do, even if said thing was stupid and reckless. “Plus look at all the trash from the supply units going north. They throw all kinds of shit on the road.” 

As John fished around in the actual trash, Damon chewed on his chapped lips (making them worse) and shook his head in frustration. “Explain to me what genius has our supply convoys going past a town where these fucking Iraqi military units never surrendered?” Was that a stupid question? Was he the stupid one? Hell, maybe he was the stupid one. Maybe this made a whole lot of sense, and somewhere along the line Damon had just lost his ability to discern a good idea from a bad idea. It was possible that it was the chapped lips talking, but he was really starting to run out of a very long stretch of patience for command. 

Everyone else seemed _just dandy_ , though. At least, they appeared to be. John had finally found something worth it in the trash and held up his trophy triumphant, blocking a bit of the sun from Damon’s view. “Check it out! Pound Cake!” He ripped the packet open with his teeth and came trotting back, happy to ignore the fact that nothing was making _sense_ so as long as he had some pound cake. “Right off the ground. Fuckin’ POGs got so much food they just toss the shit.”

That _was_ pretty insulting. It seemed like a real failure of logistics that the POGs had enough food to toss and Recon was down to one meal a day. Couldn’t someone organize a box transfer? They were the _supply unit_ , after all. Who the hell was dropping this many balls? What a fuckin’ circus. His lips hurt. 

“You’re eating discards?” Smith seemed mightily offended, but that didn’t stop him from taking the offered piece that John tossed at him. The crumbly mess was mostly falling to the ground, but enough of it was making it into John’s mouth that the lower half of his face was mostly pound cake debris. 

“I’m fucking hungry,” John complained, and Damon didn’t fault him for it. As John settled back into place next to him, he didn’t offer him any of his prize. Probably because he remembered that of all the different things to find in MREs, Damon found pound cake the most atrocious. Everyone else loved it, but Damon thought it was a pitiful excuse for a food item. It was more like someone had baked bread and then smashed all the crumbs of it together with a little bit of water. He would rather starve than eat pound cake. “This marine needs more than one meal a day.” 

Damon ignored the rest of the conversation from then on. He quietly stewed in his place, looking around in his binoculars every now and then, doing what he was _supposed_ to be doing as a recon marine. He was reconing, but he got the idea that eventually it wouldn’t matter. There was no way he was seeing something that the marines already camped here hadn’t picked up on. They were here to find the dead marine, to bring the guy back. They weren’t here to play chicken with the Republican Guard. 

Then he caught a snippet of conversation—something about putting an American Marine on a cross. It made Damon’s stomach turn over, but...so did most acts of unnecessary violence. Maybe it was pretentious of him to be separating violence into categories, but that’s how his mind worked. War was messy, people died. But there were certain lines you didn’t cross, and that was one of them.

But that’s the thing—it wasn’t something _unique_ to the Iraqis. That kind of fucked up behavior was a staple of humanity as a whole. Hell, if someone invaded America? You could bet money that some people in his own country would do the same thing. Psychopaths were everywhere. It felt strange to him to focus all his rage on this one incident, as though this should define his enemy. 

Maybe that was the philosophical side of him talking. Or the chapped lips. He didn’t know. What he did know is that he needed to stop overthinking shit and get his ass back into gear. Waxing deep wasn’t helpful to his team. There was a reason the leaders upped the moto from time to time. A low morale can kill a military faster than artillery. Besides, it wasn’t like he _liked_ the Republican Guard. He hated them. He was _glad_ to be here, fighting them...it was just that sometimes he felt like he was the only one taking the time to see things like they were. 

But fuck it, he was still pissy. 

“You need to calm down, D.” John hummed low next to him, looking at something through the scope of his weapon. “Eat some pound cake.”

“I fucking hate pound cake,” Damon said, as though he hated pound cake more than he hated everything that had happened. “I don’t want any pound cake. Don’t give me that shit.” He dropped his binoculars and glared aimlessly at the road in front of him. He tried not to focus on any of the dead bodies. Sure, some of them might have had it coming. 

He was certain the little kid did not. 

John was looking at him. He could feel it. He could _feel_ that grandmother stare all the way down to his core. “Damon, don’t be a pussy. Eat some pound cake.” John shoved the last bit of it into his hands by force, and Damon sneered at the yellow mess. “You’re grouchy as hell. Your blood sugar is low…” he squinted at him, and Damon squinted back. “And your lips are chapped.” 

Son of a bitch. “I know that, John. Thank you, John. What would I do without you, John.” Damon gripped, sounding a lot like a broken and very bitchy record. John didn’t take offense, despite the fact that in the moment Damon certainly meant it. 

“Eat the pound cake.” John said, looking slightly amused as he got back up to trail across the road, in search of more discards to add to his growing stock pile. 

  
Damon ate the pound cake, but he was _not_ happy about it.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm making this a two part series because SOMEHOW I have enough of this strange pair to do so. Anyway, I'm pulling a Gretchen. I'm making John/Damon a THING.
> 
> Thanks to Ancamna0 as always for being the best friend ever and for supporting my wild tangents.


End file.
